Equal Opportunities International

Swept Under the Carpet: Housework in Families Where the Woman is the Breadwinner
Peggy Stamp,
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Peggy Stamp, (1985) "Swept Under the Carpet: Housework in Families Where the Woman is the Breadwinner", Equal
Opportunities International, Vol. 4 Issue: 2, pp.10-13, https://doi.org/10.1108/eb010420
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 Swept Under the Carpet: Housework in Families
Where the Woman is the Breadwinner
by Peggy Stamp
Peggy Stamp is Honorary Research Fellow at the Universi-
ty of Lancaster and a Marriage Guidance Counsellor. She
was educated at the University of Toronto; Wellington
University in New Zealand; Moray House, Edinburgh; and
the University of Lancaster. She does freelance research
and has published articles in education and sociology.
Housework is one of those embarrassing subjects that
keeps reappearing however much one tries to ignore it.
Indeed it much resembles its own subject matter in its
tendency to demand attention again and again - like the
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dirt, the mess, the laundry and the next meal.
The embarrassment stems from the fact that although
housework is generally admitted to be tedious, repetitive
and intrinsically unrewarding, it seems to resist attempts
to rationalise or get rid of it. Ann Oakley's[1] masterly
study of middle and working class housewives and their
attitudes to their work analysed the sources of their
dissatisfaction, but could suggest only a total transforma-
tion of social and economic structures as a solution. But if
the segregation of women in the housewife role is a
by-product of capitalism, socialism provides no better
alternatives. As Benston[2] pointed out, women in social-
ist Russia and Eastern Europe are expected to carry two
jobs, the one at home and another one elsewhere. The job
at home is not even acknowledged as work, since it
produces no commodity for the market. Other articles in
the same volume (Malos,[3]) exhort, bemoan, deride and
ridicule, but fail to suggest alternatives compatible with
industrialisation and the nuclear family.
It - housework - has traditionally been seen as woman's
problem, her role and, since Victorian times, her calling.
It is only relatively recently (Friedan[4]) that this view has
been challenged, and Martin & Roberts[5] have demons-
trated clearly that women in Britain still do most of the
housework, even when they are working full-time outside
the home. The focus of this article is what happens when
women not only work full-time, but are also the main
breadwinners in the family.
The justification for the allocation of housework to
women to perform has been their responsibility for child
care: since women give birth, they should also feed
children; since they are then in the home, they should
look after it. This has been extended to apply to all
women whether they have children or not, whether they
are at home or not.
The work itself, as Oakley[6] demonstrates, has many
of the negative characteristics of assembly line working,
such as monotony, fragmentation and excessive pace, with
an absence of social interaction. In an effort to give
structure and meaning to this work, many women set their
own very high standards, a "search for satisfaction" which
involves very long hours.
It is remarkable, really, that housework has not been
rationalised. Oakley found six core tasks: in order of
preference: cooking, shopping, washing, cleaning,
washing up and ironing. Modern equipment has certainly
10
taken some of the drudgery out of these jobs, but it has
also raised the standards expected of women. They learn
what is expected of them from their mothers and from
society, expressed through the media. And the media
message is clear: this is what women do, and doing it well
gives them pleasure. Promises of robots taking over the
repetitive jobs in the home have failed to produce results,
and housework still occupies an average 77 hours a week
for full-time housewives[7], and it doesn't give them much
pleasure.
This could be one reason why married women have
been entering the marketplace in such numbers. Martin &
Roberts[8] found that 60% of their large sample of
married women were working, 34% full-time. They
nevertheless still had the responsibility for the housework
and child care, and probably did most of it as well. They
saw it as their primary role.
A small sub-group of Martin & Roberts' sample were
the 7% of wives who earned as much or more than their
husbands. They do not explore this group, and except for
Hamill's[9] statistical analysis, nor has anyone else.
Although individual examples of wives who earn more
than their husbands occur in most studies of dual-career
couples (see for example Rapoport & Rapoport,[10])
there has been no systematic examination of such families
to see whether they differ in any way from other families
in which the wife works.
Breadwinning Wives
"Breadwinning wives" is the term I have coined to denote
women who are the main, though not necessarily the only,
support of the family. Although they have seldom
attracted much attention, they are not a new phe-
nomenon. According to Hamill[ll] there has been a
steady 5% of working wives who were earning at least as
much as their husbands, and this proportion has been
increasing over the last decade. The 1982 Family Expendi-
ture Survey figures show that 7.8% of households have
women as "the chief economic supporter other than head
of household ... the person who ... has the highest normal
gross income". This represents an increase of .3% from
the 1981 figures, and there is no indication that the
numbers are decreasing.
There may be a number of factors contributing to this
increase in breadwinning wives: one could speculate that
increased unemployment, equal pay legislation, women's
heightened awareness of advantages to them of continuing
to work after marriage and children, more fluid sex roles,
the high divorce rate - and no doubt many others might be
relevant. We are not here concerned with establishing the
conditions which may have led up to this change, but
rather to examining some of the effects it has had on the
people involved.
It appears to be a challenge to the very basis of sexual
stereotyping in Britain, and possibly other countries in the
Western world. References are abundant in both English
and American studies to the importance of breadwinning
to society's, and men's and women's own views of the
masculine role. (Martin & Roberts,[12] and Taubin &
 Mudds,[13] are recent examples.) The concomitant
female responsibility has, of course, been houswork and
child care.
So what happens in these families where the wife is the
main breadwinner? When the woman takes over the
major breadwinner role, does the man take over the
housework and child care role? Is there, in fact, a
complete role reversal, or are certain aspects of the
stereotypes held on to by the individuals involved?
Exploratory Study
These were some of the questions forming the background
to a small exploratory study carried out in 1983-84
involving interviews with 18 breadwinning wives and 14 of
their husbands (4 husbands were unwilling to take
part)[14]. As the subject has received so little research
attention there were few guidelines on what aspects might
be most relevant, but the main focus of the approach was
the effect the unorthodox roles in breadwinning might
have on the relationship of the couple. The loosely
structured interview did not actually include questions
about how domestic work was managed, nor indeed any
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direct probes about what husbands did with their time.
Both these subjects arose spontaneously and repeatedly.
Further data was obtained from diaries which the subjects
kept for a week, detailing ways in which their time was
spent.
The sample were all resident in the North-West of
England at the time of the study. The wives were mostly
teachers of one kind or another, but included also one
secretary, two nurses, two clerical/administrative jobs and
two other professional. Two couples, both childless, were
in their 20's, twelve were in their 30's, two in their 40's and
two in their 50's. 13 wives had graduate status. It is
difficult to know how typical they were of breadwinning
wives: their high educational qualifications seem to make
them exceptional, though Hamill's 1978 analysis found
that most breadwinning wives were professional - how else
would they earn enough to support a family, or forfeit the
benefits their husbands might claim if she were dependent
on him.
Information on their husbands is less complete because
of the four husbands who declined to participate. It is
known, however, that 5 were unemployed, 5 were
self-employed craftsmen (which could involve anything
from 1/2 hour to 10 hours in a day), 3 were students, one
was an unskilled worker, two were self-employed profes-
sionals, establishing careers, one was freelance profes-
sional and one professional-in-training. Twelve were
educated at least to a degree level.
It was recognised from the beginning that couples might
be reluctant to expose sensitive areas of their relationship,
and no effort was made to probe into these more than the
subjects volunteered, but as far as one could tell, these
were successful marriages: the very fact that they were
willing to co-operate in the research suggests that,
whatever the difficulties, they had made a reasonable
adjustment to the demands of role reversal in economic
support of the family, and sometimes in other responsibili-
ties as well.
Housework
This adjustment, however, tended not to extend to
housework, which was apparently the aspect of the
homemaker role least likely to be accepted by the
husbands in this study. As detailed below, it emerged as a
bone of contention in several of the marriages, the issue
11
being whether it was really necessary to do it at all.
The term "houswork" encompasses many different
kinds of jobs, and a distinction was made by all of these
couples between essential things, like child care, and less
essential things, primarily cleaning and tidying. The
husbands who had major responsibility for the care of
young children were aware of the advantage they enjoyed
of close involvement with them: "I have been able to
participate fully in the upbringing of our child". This may
have helped them to make sense of the conflicting
impressions they were given by other people, as "Quite a
lot of men say 'I would like to stay at home' - you don't
know if they really mean it"; and also, "It doesn't seem to
count for anything, the fact that it was the father looking
after the child". The wives who left children in the care of
their husbands, moreover, gave them credit for doing it so
well, and for the peace of mind it gave them: "I just don't
worry about them at all if (husband) has got them,
whereas is somebody else was, I might". All the husbands
with pre-school children (7 at the time of the interview)
made use of some alternative care arrangements, such as
baby-minders or nurseries, for part of the time, but even
so "I had no idea that it would be so difficult, that time
would be so short ... if I had, I probably wouldn't have
done it"; and three fathers said that once was enough, "I
would have grave doubts about taking on the major
responsibility of raising another child". Thus child care
had a certain priority for those husbands who undertook it
(11, at one time or another).
It was sometimes difficult to be clear exactly what was
meant by other aspects of "housework". "We've all got
these built-in ideas, like some people think that if you're
looking after the house you're keeping it like an absolute
new pin." In an effort to clarify what was involved, as well
as understand the load each was carrying, couples were
asked to keep a diary of activities for a week, and 16 of the
wives and 12 of the husbands were able to do so. Four of
these husbands were doing more housework than their
wives. On the other hand, five (of the 18) wives felt they
did most of the housework. There were definite prefer-
ences amongst the jobs to be done: cooking was done
occasionally by most husbands, frequently by 6 of them
Two of the husbands drew the line at washing and ironing,
and 4 didn't do any cleaning or tidying at all, on the basis
that it wasn't important and didn't need doing[15].
This cleaning and tidying, or something akin to it,
seems to have been the point at issue with 9 of the
couples. It didn't bother the husbands, but it did bother
the wives: "The house is usually a tip and I sometimes
envy the leisured ladies in our village whose homes
resemble magazine ads"; "not a lot of housework goes on
at all"; "I would like the house to be clean and well
decorated - it remains a deep thing in me - I can't have it
and it bothers me"; "He's following a sort of female role
but doesn't bother about the housework. He has no
compulsion to clean and polish". This seems to imply that
the ideal of a clean, tidy, and well-ordered home is
something women are programmed to strive for, but men
not: that it is a cultural expectation that women should
express themselves through their homes, but "they
(people) don't treat you like they would a woman who
stayed at home" in that a man's role at home is not seen as
"representative of his values" as it would be with a
woman. Moreover, the diaries of allocation of time over a
week revealed an enormous variation in the total amount
of time spent by different couples on all housework,
ranging from a low Mean (for both) of 141 minutes to a
high Mean of 370 minutes in a day. Children clearly made
more work, but explained only part of the differences,
 which seemed to depend more on the importance placed
on it by the wives than on any intrinsic need for it.
Although they had taken on a major extra responsibility,
they could not rid themselves of a conditioned compulsion
to maintain the housekeeping standards they had learned
from their mothers. They may even have been reluctant to
relinquish certain aspects of the female role, in some way
equating baking and preserving with nurturance, for
example.
This is entirely consistent with recent research, which
finds over and over again, with a persistent mild surprise,
that even if wives work fulltime, in demanding jobs, in
purportedly egalitarian marriages, they continue to carry
the major responsibility for housework, and usually do
most of it as well. In 67% of the families in Martin &
Roberts'[16] sample the working wives said they did most
of the housework, and their husbands agreed. (The
proportion was the same in this study.) (See also Geerkin
& Gove,[17]; Lopata, Barnwolt & Norr,[18]; Gowler &
Legge,[19]; Scanzoni,[20]; and Yogev,[21].) The data do
not provide information to determine whether some
housework is necessary if women are to do it, but
unnecessary if men are to do it. How much REALLY
needs to be done. And for whom? By what criteria?
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What is Work?
Implicit in the above, and in the attitudes of the men
interviewed, was the conviction that housework is not
work, not worthy of a man's time and attention. One
husband who had been unemployed for about 6 months
(he obtained employment before the interview but re-
ported on his experience): "I didn't want to settle into a
pattern of being a house-spouse. It was just that there
were things that I could do with my time that interested
me more"; and another "When you're tired because your
day's been disrupted and your nerves are on edge and
you've come to the end of yet another day when you've
done nothing, you've just wasted it ..."; and yet another,
"It's not as though I'm just sitting at home looking after
children. I mean I've got ... all sorts of other things that
I'm trying to do". One wife said of her husband, "he isn't
actually a housewife, and he works".
What she meant, and what most of the husbands meant,
is that they needed, for their own self-respect, to do
something they could regard as constructive and purpose-
ful. The diaries were most revealing in this respect.
Overall the husbands spent on average over 2 hours a day
on various D.I.Y. projects, household repairs and renova-
tion. Since some of the husbands were working full-time
(and overtime in the case of two) the time spent in this
way by the others was considerable. One husband who
worked from home and looked after two children, "I
couldn't limit myself to housework. I have to do some-
thing else too"; and another, who had the full responsibil-
ity of looking after his young child while preparing to start
his professional practice, "I couldn't continue to do
nothing. (If it had continued) I would have had to find
something to do".
Pahl[22] speculated that the present economic recession
might stimulate an informal economy, by which unem-
ployed men might do work for each other on a reciprocal
basis. His later work (Pahl & Wallace,[22] found no
evidence of this, nor even much "self-provisioning"
amongst unemployed men on Sheppey. On the contrary,
he found a polarisation between busy households with lots
of earners, skills, equipment and money; and others, with
one earner or none, with little in the way of skills,
equipment or money - or extra activity. So unemployment
in itself does not seem to provide the conditions for active
12
D.I.Y. work.
It is relevant here perhaps that 4 of the husbands in this
sample were able to develop a hobby or interest into a
career because their wives were able to support them. Two
others were students, and three were establishing pro-
fessional careers. Most were well educated. These men had
the skills.
If it is true that "there is as yet no really viable role of
"househusband" in American society" as Geerkin and
Gove[24] found, it appears that the same is true also in
English society. Marsden and Duff[25] noted that the
unemployed men in their sample feared loss of their manly
status if they let their wives go out to work, and thought
housework was not a man's work. Although the husbands
of these breadwinning wives all did some housework, and
some did a lot, they needed something else to define them.
One self-employed craftsman knew that looking after his
young child would take most of his time, but found his
professed occupation a useful front. Another looked after
three children, but still spent an average 1¼ hours on his
craft daily. Their occupations, however, part-time, pro-
vided them with an identity which was important to them.
It also provided them with an income, however small,
which went into their "pockets", acknowledged as im-
portant. (This aspect of the study is dealt with elsewhere in
more detail. See Stamp,[26].)
Support Networks
One thing the husbands did not do was make any attempt
to establish a network analagous to the female one by
which transport, child supervision, etc. are shared and
exchanged, and mutual support provided. Most of the
husbands claimed not to have considered attempting to
establish reciprocal arrangements of this kind with other
men in similar situations, and seemed somewhat repelled
by the suggestion. As one wife said of her unemployed
husband, "He can't make contact with equivalent women
and wouldn't want to see equivalent men. He doesn't
want to advertise the fact of his situation". Another
husband did know of a man living nearby who was in a
similar position, but would not think of approaching him
for help. Two had received overtures from local mothers,
inviting them in effect to become part of the established
female network, but they were either unwilling or unable
to join in. One husband had made some attempt to engage
in the local mothers' and toddlers' group, but found the
mode of social interaction quite alien: in men's conversa-
tion "you're very much setting out your stall", while
women are "more chatty, less guarded", will reveal more,
talk about personal problems. Another husband used to
get annoyed at playgroup, because the mothers used to sit
around and talk with each other, and he thought they
should play with the children.
This diffidence about asking for help: "People have to
offer, he'll never ask", combined with awkwardness in
relating to groups of women, tended to increase the social
isolation of the husbands without outside work. One
husband described being driven to go shopping just for the
social contact. They tended then to become even more
dependent on such networks as they had, which in turn
made it difficult for their wives to contemplate any
promotion which entailed moving away.
Men's preferred strategies for coping with this aspect of
financial dependency might be different from women's,
regardless of the circumstances, but if staying at home and
looking after a child were seen as simply one of many
acceptable adaptations to employment circumstances and
flexible role expectations, they might find it easier to
explore alternatives. As it is, each couple felt they had to
 work out their problems from the beginning, without
guidelines from the past or help from others.
Summary
Observations from this study must be treated with the
caution appropriate to a small, local study. The subjects
were volunteers, and their high level of education may
have assisted them to cope positively with their unconven-
tional financial arrangements while others, who were
feeling some strain in similar relationships, felt unable to
discuss their lives with a stranger and researcher. Howev-
er, in some ways the nature of the sample makes these
observations even more pointed. These people are coping
adequately with a pattern which is becoming quite
widespread, which suggests that they have found some
ways of dealing with any difficulties they have encoun-
tered.
This study of 18 breadwinning wives and 14 of their
husbands shows again that husbands are reluctant to take
on the responsibility for housework even when their wives
are working full-time, supporting the family economically,
and even when they themselves are not. This is partly
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bound up with the low value placed on housework, and
partly with the need for an identity based on some kind of
"purposeful" work. Even when they did quite a lot of
housework, and child caring, they also found work to do
around the house, whether craft, or D.I.Y. or mainte-
nance and repair, which was consistent with their concepts
of masculine activity. This work was confined to their own
homes, and there was no attempt either to seek out other
men in similar situations for reciprocal child-care/work
arrangements, or to join in already existing female
networks of a similar nature, or to exchange skilled labour
with other men.
13
References
1. Oakley, A., The Sociology of Housework, London, Martin
Robertson, 1974.
2. Benston, Margaret, The Political Economy of Women's Liberation,
in Malos, Ellen (Ed.), The Politics of Housework, London: Allison
& Busby Ltd., 1980.
3. Malos, E., Ibid.
4. Friedan, B., The Feminine Mystique, London, Gollanz, 1963.
5. Martin, J. and Roberts, C , Women & Employment, a Lifetime
Perspective, Report of the 1980 DE/OPCS Women & Employment
Survey, London, HMSO, 1984.
6. Oakley, A., op. cit.
7. Ibid.
8. Martin and Roberts, op. cit.
9. Hamill, L., Wives as Sole and Joint Breadwinners, London, DHSS,
1978.
10. Rapoport R., and Rapoport, R.N., Dual-Career Families Re-
Examined, New York, Harper & Row, 1976.
11. Hamill, L., op. cit.
12. Martin and Roberts, op. cit.
13. Taubin, S. and Mudd, E., "Traditional Families," in Macklin,
E.D. and Rubin, R.H., Contemporary Families and Alternative
Lifestyles: Handbook on Research and Theory, Beverly Hills, Sage
Publications, 1983.
14. For a more complete description of the sample and how it was
obtained see Stamp, P., "Breadwinning Wives - A Pilot Study,"
Marriage Guidance, Autumn 1984; "Breadwinning Wives - Im-
plications for Counselling," Marriage Guidance, Winter 1984; and
"Balance of Financial Power in Marriage," Sociological Review, (in
press).
15. It is recognised that this small sample has no statistical significance,
but numbers are given for the suggestions contained in them.
16. Martin and Roberts, op. cit.
17. Geerkin, M. and Gove, W., At Home and at Work: The Family's
Allocation of Labor, Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1983.
18. Lopata, H., Barnewolt, D. and Norr, K., " "Spouses" contribu-
tions to each others roles", in Pepitone-Rockwell, F.(Ed.), Dual
Career Couples, London, Sage Publications, 1980.
19. Gowler, D. and Legge, K., "Hidden and Open Contracts in
Marriage," in Rapoport, R. and Rapoport, R.N.(Eds.), Working
Couples, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.
20. Scanzoni, J., Sex Roles, Women's Work and Marital Conflict,
Lexington, Lexington Books, 1978.
21. Yogev, S., "Do Professional Women have Egalitarian Marital
Relationships?" Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, No.
4, 1981.
22. Pahl, R., "Employment, Work and the domestic division of
labour," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
Vol.4, No. 6, 1980.
23. Pahl, R. and Wallace, C., "Household Work Strategies in an
Economic Recession," in Redclift, N. and Mingione, E.(Eds.).
Beyond Employment: Household, Gender ana Subsistence, London,
Blackwell, 1984.
24. Geerkin and Gove, op. cit.
25. Marsden, D. and Duff, E., Workless: Some Unemployed Men and
Their Families, Penguin, 1975.
26. Stamp, (in press), op. cit.
 This article has been cited by:

1. Peggy Stamp. 1985. Research note: Balance of financial power in marriage: an exploratory study of breadwinning wives. The
Sociological Review 33:3, 546-557. [CrossRef]
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